CHAPTER 1 - The Early Years and Growing Up in Zikhron
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| Malka & Efraim Aronson & their Six Children |
They had come from Bacau in Romania - not to be confused with Baku in Azerbaijan - where Jews had lived for some centuries in conditions of the usual pogrom and persecution inflicted upon their people by their rulers and the peasant population. The ideas of ‘Hoveve Zion’ began to take root here around 1880. The idea was to found agricultural settlements in the Land of Israel, revive the Hebrew language and create a Jewish national confsciousness. The appeal - in Yiddish -began: ‘To our brothers in faith, sons of Israel from Bacau. You all know the necessity to support the holy purpose of colonisation in Eretz Israel. We make an appeal to every one, depending on their wealth, to make a contribution for the holy purpose, and we will publish in newspapers all these donations with the donor’s name. Thanks to such actions we will set off singing for Zion... ’
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| The Departure of the Aronson Family on the Thetis, 1882 |
And while not exactly singing on their departure, those on that steamer felt blessed to leave the country that they had called home for a thousand years. As Romanians from Bacau they had lived under Ottoman rule until 1878, when Romania became independent and the non-Jewish Romanians proved to be even more antisemitic than the Turks. Although Palestine was an unknown and very foreign Middle Eastern land, their previous experience as Ottoman subjects, their Jewish faith and their strong belief in the Return to Zion, quickly erased any uncertainties and the appeal was heeded most vigorously by donations and monthly contributions - the Jews from Bacau being among the most generous. In 1882, a number of families including the Aronsons, set out for that legendary Zion. An eye witness, Yosef Brüll, from Bacau, described, in a newspaper article of August of that year, the emotional moments he had witnessed: the crowd of Jews who had accompanied those who were leaving at the station and the port, the encouraging words said by the great and the good of the community, the many tears and spontaneous applause which broke out at the moment they set off.
The steamer ‘Thetis’ sailed from Rumania - today’s Romania - through the Black Sea, the Bosphorous and the soon-to-be deadly Dardanelles, past Gallipoli, scene of so much futile suffering in that first Great War, during which much of our story will take place. The ship enters the Mediterranean with its motley bunch of immigrants. Some are sea-sick, others already homesick but all have hope in their hearts. Among the hopeful but sorely exhausted passengers, the Aronson family, formerly of Bacau, of Romanian Jewish descent - father Efraim and mother Malka and their young sons, Aron and Zvi.
Their destination is Syrian Palestine in the Ottoman Empire. Their reasons for departure many and complex: escaping pogroms, state sponsored restrictions and violence, economic limitations and the heart-felt belief that Jews could only survive as Jews in the ancient land where, of course, many Jews had lived in quiet destitution for many years, devoting their time to the study of ancient texts, to burial in the holy land and their dreams of the Coming of a Messiah. Those on board the Thetis were of a different ilk. They dreamed of a return to Zion, a revival of the parched and poverty-stricken land where they could indeed find a home and live as free human beings.
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| Jaffa Port |
The authorities will not permit the ship to dock. The Government in Constantinople believes these Jews are agents for the British. They issue a strongly worded decree forbidding any Jewish immigration for fear of English imperialism taking a foothold in the country. The distraught and exhausted passengers will be followed by many others, equally distraught and exhausted, also forbidden entry. The Thetis turned back from every port, searches for another entry point. The boys are both coughing. The mother distressed. The father convinced that the Jewish God will ensure their well-being. The conditions on board are poor, dirty and unsanitary. Food is perilously short. Water is rationed. Such conditions will plague other desperate wanderers escaping more certain death later in the century.
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| Jaffa on Arrival |
When they finally are permitted to disembark - the Aronson family gathers in the bewildering heat stepping over donkey manure and rubbish of all sorts, amidst the noise and shouting of a shoving crowd speaking a baffling language. The Jaffa port officials have their own reasons for this about turn. The disheveled Jews and their many suitcases, trunks, samovars and other household goods, are removed from the ship - some never to be reunited with their owners - and the immigrants are confined to Jaffa, guarded by Turkish Soldiers. They are placed in dirty pensions - forced to pay their own board and lodging at exorbitant prices and unable to continue their longed for journey.
Baksheesh is duly paid. This, the local Ottoman Officials value more than any directive from Constantinople’s Sublime Porte. The Romanians muster the money together and pay off the authorities and arrived in Haifa - a majority Muslim and part Christian city where they found lodgings at a caravansary or khan, a hostelry with a large courtyard and long dormitories, housing about sixty families in all. They did not stay for long, not feeling comfortable among those other Peoples of The Book whose every gaze was hostile and full of suspicion, and soon fled the mosques and churches heading south in a long caravan of mules and laden carts containing what was left of the many suitcases, trunks, samovars and other household goods - pulled by stubborn and slow-moving oxen. As night fell, they entered a narrow pass and those stubborn beasts refused to go a hoof further. The men took apart the wagons and hauled them up the hills with the women carrying bags and baggage and babies and a stream of snotty, distressed children followed in their wake. The oxen who had begun wandering off were lashed together with rope and driven by whips and shouts over that steep pass. All around them in the night were the rasping cries and moon-mad howls of jackals and foxes, strange creatures in the foreign, hot darkness that terrified the children and frightened the mothers. Even the animals were against them it seemed! At last they came to the Carmel foothills and climbing with a final burst, compounded of exhaustion and effort, they summited a particular hill where a small village of peasants or fellahin scraped a living from the rocky ground living in conditions of abject misery, in dilapidated mud-and-wattle shacks. This was called by the local tribe, Zammarin, which would become the location of their new settlement. Here the sixty families - a few had got lost along the way - or regretting their decision returned to the Old Country or set out for America on boats requisitioned with more baksheesh.
The remaining raggle-taggle caravan spent their first night - a rainy one - where lightning, thunder and jackals created more terror - under the canvas of those former ox wagons. The next morning at first light, the rain had unbelievably dried to a thin, hot mist and they surveyed their surroundings. Men went to look for water, women unpacked pots and made tea. Bread was sought from those inhabitants of that derelict-looking collection of higgledy-piggledy huts, who were happy to exchange their dry loaves for many times more than they were worth.
By evening, shelters were erected and in the next months, simple huts, also of wattle and daub were built, canvas used for shade, a communal oven, built for baking bread and fields cleared of rocks and weeds, snakes and rodents, for the planting of wheat, barley and rye. Precious seeds bought on that ship the ‘Thetis’ which had set out from Bacau with so much ignorance and so much hope...
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| The Lumière Brothers Film Jaffa Station 1896 |
A train departs Manshiyya Station in Jaffa, bound for Jerusalem - a crowded platform of Arabs staring suspiciously at those brothers Lumière wielding their heavy, cinema cameras. A silent film, to be sure, but filled with the hidden questions of the local inhabitants who had lived in the Land for many centuries. The sound of train wheels screeching and the hissing, puffing boiler of an iron monster driven by steam and fire, roaring down the track, the scream of a child, a woman’s cry, men offloading goods in Jaffa’s harbour.
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Jaffa’s Harbour |
Hovels and shops stream by, narrow alleys, much haggling, much poverty, camels and donkeys crowd the roads, street vendors yell their wares in hoarse, urgent voices.
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The Jaffa Gate with Passers-By |
The train stops in Jerusalem, the sacred city of those three haggling faiths, the French frères capture, the Jaffa Gate, passers-by in the Muslim Quarter, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre makes an appearance, children stare and point at the camera, women grumble and make the sign of the evil eye, silent men wonder at the future, leprous beggars beg for alms -
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| Ottoman Military Band |
- Turkish soldiers march, an Ottoman military band, predicts a turbulent future.
The Montefiore Windmill with Jewish Arrivals
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| Camel Caravan |
The Lumières cast light on that lost period, a camel caravan, as ancient as time trudges through the desert - a rough rail track winds through the mountains and before we know it, we are in the fertile, swamp lands of the coastal plain where the main action of our chronicle takes place...’
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| Rehov Hameyasdim, Zikhron Ya’akov, Present Day |
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| View of Zikhron Ya’akov, c 1910 |
A panoramic view of a green hilltop on Mount Carmel. A small settlement - the ‘Moshava’ - clings to the brow of the hill. Below stretches a plain covered with malarial swamps, down to the distant sea. Behind are vineyards with a stone watch tower and a field of pale golden wheat, stretching as far as the eye can see. The town is named Zikhron Ya’akov - in memory of the founder’s father. The date is some time in late summer at the turn of the nineteenth century in the Levant of Ottoman Palestine.
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Children Playing Zikhron Ya'acov, Photographed by Leo Kahn, 1912
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The streets, if you can call them that, are also highways for horses, carts, sheep and children who play in the dust, unworried by cars.
A man and a woman in their fifties, the very same we have just met on that noisy port side in Jaffa, now tried and tested farmers, Efraim, small and bearded, and Malka, big-boned and tired-looking, in plain dress and headscarf, working in the fields of ready to be harvested, wheat. The heat burns down, a strange buzz hums in the glittering air.
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| Malka & Efraim in the Wheatfields |
Malka looks up. The sight fills her startled eyes. A dark cloud of evil-looking birds in the brilliant blue sky announces the imminent disaster. Blood bursts in her eardrums. Six children gather around her: teenage boys Aron and Zvi, younger sons, Sam and Alex and little daughters, Sara and Rebekka, known as Rifka. Aron is much older than his sisters; fourteen years senior to Sara and sixteen to Rifka. The sound is deafening, the beating of a million wings, as if the marching feet of a thousand armies. The noise is overwhelming. We see Efraim’s anxious face as he looks up in horror. The dark cloud is made up of a million locusts. They smash into the family, who helplessly bat them away, from the ripe, golden crops. Aron, Zvi and Sam take branches and start to whack the horrible plague. Alex stamps on as many of the red and green aliens as he can with a look of what might be, glee. Rifka covers her shell-like ears in terror, batting away the horrible monsters with her fragile, pale hands and burying her tearful face in her mother’s skirts.
The locusts in a whir of angry wings settle in a dark swarm on the field and in seconds devour everything. The family regard all their efforts, all their food security going up in proverbial smoke.
The scene fades to black and silence.
Fighting the Locusts Across the Land
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‘Well, it was not exactly like that but as close as the distant years and the choking desert sands have rendered my memory. Certainly, by all accounts, the locusts were very bad that year and the watch tower had most definitely been built. I am most sure of that - it was a circular stone tower of rough hewn rocks, the vantage point from which those important ships would be viewed passing by, allowing time to get down to the coast before their arrival. I can see it now as if I had shut my eyes only a second earlier. Except perhaps that it is a bit academic to talk of shutting my eyes. For how can a dead person have eyes, I can hear you ask?
And how could we know - without being told - without at least a clue - that these people were of ‘Romanian Jewish descent’? Perhaps it was the look on the man’s face - a gentle lyricism, an acceptance of fate and all its evil ways, tempered by years of bitter hardship and on the woman’s face - a look of anger, even shame, fury at God and the callousness of His actions - after all they have done, after all they have been through? Could He not understand? Could He not have interceded? No resignation there, no resignation at all.
The red, obviously, is the dust, the sound of the millions of wings, the sound of the songs of mourning of loved ones, the seven nights of sitting Shiva and the Angel of Death always hovering.
This is indeed a love story and a story of war and as we are told, all is fair in both love and war...
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A lusty, healthy baby girl, plump and contented, my love Sarati came into the world on January 5th 1890. Born at home in a farming colony in the Carmel hills of late Ottoman Palestine. Her parents Efraim ‘Fischel’ Aronson and mother Malka, who hailed from Bacau in Romania. In 1882 they had set out with others of their kind to the barren Levant to set up a Jewish village in the ancient land, then claimed by the Turks and occupied by local tribes and wandering Bedouins. Here my heart’s desire was born, and took her first steps as the fifth of the six living children of her hardworking Jewish parents. At first father and mother worked in the fields - though Efraim would rise to become a well-off grain merchant, buying wheat from other small-time farmers and selling it in the regional capital of Haifa. Malka dutifully produced her children, eight in all - two of whom died in infancy - little Vitya and Loba - duly buried in the dusty cemetery of the nascent little town - and four sons - Aron the eldest, born in the Galutz who was six-years-old when he accompanied his parents to the backwater that would become their home. Zvi was just four.
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| Sara in the centre with Alexander, Rifka & Aron, 1896 |
The others were born on the moshava - the town itself - or in Haifa at the hospital, Shmuel or Sam, who perhaps wisely, kept himself apart in later life, confident, forthright Alex, born in 1888, the fourth of the six children and two daughters, kittenish, little Rifka, the youngest, and Sara, two years older, the object of my heart.
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| Childhood on the Moshava |
The parents brought them up in the Hebrew tradition, with the strict, patriarchal ways so familiar from the past and from my own upbringing. Yet, in all things, the mother, the matriarch, was actually the principal parent, also common in families such as ours. Like my sisters, the girls learned piano and folk dancing and Sara as the eldest daughter was taught the arts of housekeeping and cooking by her exacting mother. Rifka never managed such mundane tasks, believing perhaps she was destined for better things. The doting mother, Malka, was their queen as her name implies, and the brothers, were told from the youngest age that they were the descendants of King David and as such had great destinies to fulfill.
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| Avshalom's Parents Israel ‘Lolik’ Feinberg & ‘Fanny’ Fanya Belkind |
Mine had no such illustrious, royal predecessors but found their genesis in a revival of the desire to Return to the Land of those invisible ancestors. I was born in Gedera in that Land on 23 October 1889 to pioneers ‘Fanny’ - Fanya - Feye Sara born Belkind and Israel ‘Lolik’ Feinberg who came from Mogilev near Minsk in Belarus. Delivered by my aunt Dr. Olga Belkind, who worked all her life as a midwife. My mother Fanny was one of the intelligentsia, as a girl, she studied Hebrew with her father Meir Belkind, and also attended the school for girls in Borisov - a gymnasium as it was so proudly called. She knew her bible well and wanted to be a doctor like my aunts Olga and Sonia Belkind, the latter, who would become the first female gynaecologist in the Land. Mother was permitted and even encouraged in her more secular dreams, and she moved with her sister to Saint Petersburg - but the quota for Jewish medical students was full, so instead she studied pharmacology. At the end of her studies she decided to join her two sisters who were members of the ‘Bilu’ group and in August of that year she arrived in Jaffa and wrote to her remaining sister in Russia: ‘If you don’t know yet how wonderful life can be in the splendid looking fields and farmers’ homes, arise and come to join us to the Holy Land, inhale its holy spirit in all its splendour at its mountains heights and valleys depths. The idea that you are standing on the land of your forefathers will make a new spirit swell up within you, something that our brethren living in the Diaspora cannot imagine..’.
After mother married, she moved to Gedera with father, where she was known for standing up - with both gun and sharp tongue - to the native tribes, who on occasion would attack the household or steal a few cows. She learned Arabic and it is said that she spoke it like a true ‘Fellah’ and was conversant with many of its numerous curses.
When I was two years old, we moved to Jaffa, following a conflict father had with the inhabitants of the village of Qatra, near Gedera. In Jaffa, I was educated by my grandfather, Meir Belkind, a devout Torah scholar. Later, to provide a counter balance to my Hebrew education I was sent by my father to an Arab elementary school where I learned Arabic and even studied the the Quran. Yes, both sides were already there and father wanted me to understand and be at home in them both. Mother, however, insisted I have a ‘proper education’ at the school run by the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Jaffa. At this time, father, became involved in draining and cultivating the swamps, around Hadera - although its name is similar to that of my birthplace, they were very different places. Gedera is considered to be the southern edge of central Israel while Hadera is the northern edge, hence the expression ‘from Hadera to Gedera’. In Hadera father stayed in a primitive hut and we continued to live in a small apartment in Jaffa. Mother believed our education was more important than living in a marshy swamp infested with mosquitoes! At last father managed to build us a house which mother considered more civilised than his lonely hut and we moved to what would later be known as ‘the Feinberg House’ in Hadera. In Hadera, mother learned the Arab system of farming and was nicknamed ‘Pioneer of the Pioneers’, for her teaching of farming techniques to other women settlers. But mother wasn’t happy. She wanted us to get more education. Father wasn’t well - typhoid? and we children always had fevers - malaria? - no one knew but at any rate my sisters and I were always somewhat sickly. Two years later, at mother’s request we returned to Jaffa and then moved briefly to Jerusalem. Perhaps mother hoped that that golden light would bless and protect our little family with its serene benevolence.
Photographs survive of us siblings in those early days: my older sister Shoshi and I when I was about five years old. A timid, little lad in silly stockings and prim sailor suit with my, more knowing and very clever big sister in a froth of white frills holding my hot, little hand in hers. She is born in 1887 in Rishon-Le-Zion.
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| Absa & His Sisters, Shoshi & Tsila |
Three years later Shoshi has grown into quite a little lady. Her features forthright, her gaze direct, she is dressed in navy blue velvet trimmed with white braid and a collar decorated with gold epaulette ribbons. A needle woman, she is very proud of her work. I look very nervous - mother has threatened us not to move a muscle for fear of the the stern photographer’s wrath. Our little sis Tsila, has just arrived and is placed between Shoshi and I. A serious toddler with a pale cream smock and pinafore which she will soon abandon for a pair of trousers.
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| Tsila Dressed as a Boy |
Tsila wants to be a boy, prefers carpentry to embroidery and borrows boy's clothes from our cousin! She is famous for being the first girl at school to wear trousers to gym class. She is also very clever and will study botany and agriculture in Berlin in the years of that Great War that tore us all asunder. She will marry Zeev Shoham and have two children, David and Tamar, and will live all the way to 1988.
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| Shoshana Wilbushevitz-Feinberg |
Shoshi will marry firebrand Nahum Wilbush, formerly Wilbushevitz, from Grodno in White Russia, give birth to two children, my beloved niece Zohara and nephew Joel, and live to 1981. Both my lovely sisters surviving over sixty years after I have been turned to dust.
How fortunate that none of us know the ways of the future...
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| Absa with mother Fanny, niece Zohara, sisters, Tsila, Shoshi & husband Nahum | |
In spring 1910 a lovely photograph was taken at the house of my sister Shoshi and her husband Nahum in the Haifa Colony. Little Zohara, my baby niece, sits on mother’s lap holding a picture of our absent father. Father refuses to leave the sofa so we must make do with a photograph held by little Zohara. Father is already ill. My sisters are intelligent, beautiful young woman dressed in floor-length white gowns. Shoshi with her long hair in a chignon with velvet hairband and waist ribbon has the same deeply hooded eyes as father and I do. Mother too wears white - it may have been for the occasion of the festival of Shavuoth - but none of us look too happy.
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| Tsila & Absa, a Photograph for their Father |
At the end of the year, Tsila and I are photographed again, in a smart studio in Jaffa, a Mr. Soskin takes the picture. A photo taken for father, who is about to travel to Germany for medical treatment. I wear a cream-coloured suit. Tsila with her defiant gaze, cropped hair - lice or her own strong will, dictating that pudding-bowl hair cut - inclines her had very slightly towards me - or is it I who lean on her?
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| Absa, Tsila & Fanny Feinberg |
Untreated malaria has left our father weak and with heart palpitations. Our dear papa will leave this earth in 1911. After his death, our mother Fanya wore black - albeit very fashionable black, with yards of ebony lace and many jet decorations as we see in this studio portrait. Tsila is now a very attractive, modern young woman with her chosen, cropped hair and a very pugnacious manner. She is convinced she can change the world. I have grown too into a reasonably confident chap with a moony, romantic air and a smart three-piece suit with bow-tie and detachable collar. I too am convinced I have a special mission in life, only I don’t know what that may be, yet...’
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My ideals were set at a young age. When I was twelve, along with other youngsters, we founded a group called the ‘Carriers of the Zion Flag’, which we hoped, in our youthful and perhaps prescient idealism, would establish a free Land of Israel. What we sought with all our innocent, teenage hearts was to be free from the Ottomans or any other imperialists who sought to block our way.
What a long way we still had to go before that dream was to be realised!
In the summer of 1904, we embarked on a tour of the settlements to mourn the death of our idol, Theodor Herzl. During the journey, I caught a cold, fell ill and could not recover. At this time, I was plagued by constant hallucinations and fears. Mother persuaded father that a stay in France with its cooler climate would help both my mental and bodily health. And so it was that when I was a puny boy of fourteen and a half, it was decided to send me to study in Paris. The reason given to the rest of the family was that there was no proper high school in the Land of Israel at the time. Nothing was said of my health issues...
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| Avshalom aged fifteen in Paris |
A studio portrait taken in Paris by ‘Photographie Russe’, situated at 89 Rue de Renner, which I sent back home from Paris to my sister Tsila, depicts a young man - I was now fifteen - who might have been a poet or a politician - I had not decided yet which of those I was to be - with arms folded, mouth resolute, chin set in a determined line and eyes fixed on a distant but clear, at least to me, future. The two years I spent at the high school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle were to change my life and the following three at the Sorbonne, filled my giddy head with nectar. I was in love with both the French language and the culture, and I drank in in the ideas of liberty and fraternity as if they were fine wine. My mind was on fire with fervent dreams and desires! At the university I had the chutzpa to make friends with some of my teachers and met two French intellectuals, philosopher Jacques Maritain - who would play a part in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - and poet Charles Péguy. Both were Catholics and I, of course, was a Jew, but they supported my intellectual endeavours and saw a promising future for me as a poet, at a time when a new admiration for Jews in France was having a brief renaissance. Jacques was married to the brilliant and exquisite, Raïssa Oumansoff - six years older than I, born in Rostov-on-Don, daughter of a Jewish family who had immigrated to France from Russia, fleeing the usual pogroms et al. Jacques and Raïssa met at the Sorbonne and wed in a Catholic ceremony - much against her very Jewish family’s wishes.
My dearest aunt Sonia Belkind - mother’s also brilliant, but more contrary sister, among the first women to travel from Israel to study medicine in Geneva, where she met both Chaim Weizmann and Carl Jung, and who kept her birth surname - Belkind - declining to marry her 'husband' whom she loved dearly - introduced me to the Maritains, thinking they might provide a home away from home, for a homesick boy, some stimulating conversation and some Jewish cooking!
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| Avshalom with Raïssa & Jacques Maritain in Paris |
When I visited their home at Raïssa’s invitation I was welcomed by this sweet and lovely woman who did indeed cook the dishes of my Romanian family’s past. Goulash with dill, ruby-red borscht and dumplings, sour cream and green herbs - albeit with pork sausage - and naturally, as a lonely teenager, I fell in love with her poetic soul and her exquisite beauty, despite the offending pig! Her romantic sentimentality found a fervent echo in my easily aroused heart. Her borscht soup reminded me of my mother and filled a vacuum in my always hungry stomach. Perhaps Raïssa was even a little in love with me. We were both so idealistic and absurd and Jacques was so serious that she might have found me a welcome diversion. Despite our closeness we were divided on one unmoveable point. Raïssa desperately wanted me to convert to Christianity and I refused. After all, as she said on more than one occasion, her conversion had enabled her to move up in the world. This however, was never to be part of my plan, and when we parted, I was glad I had escaped both the pain of a doomed love affair and the awfulness of apostasy! We knew we would never meet again but rumours - there were to be many others - about my French amour followed me all the way back to Palestine.
I was still suffering from the nervous condition that made me come out in red welts on my chest and the visions had not stopped. Perhaps it was teenage love sickness, perhaps something more serious? Aunt Sonia recommended I go to Switzerland to be treated. My parents reluctantly agreed - they wanted me at home - but they wanted me well first. So I stayed in the famous sanatorium of Professor Constantin von Monakow in Zurich where one day, I met a Jewish scientist, soon to become world famous. It was here that I wrote to aunt Sonia of a conversation I had with the scientist, biochemist and Zionist, Chaim Weizmann, who would needless to say, become Israel’s first President.
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| Avshalom & Chaim Weizmann, Zurich 1907 |
It was scarcely comprehensible to me that Mr. Weizmann asked me to become his research assistant. How different my path might have been had I had taken that option!
I recorded the event in one of my journals as taking place on the night of the thirtieth of December 1907: ‘And you, listen to me!’ - Mr. W told me. ‘Forget America, come to England with me. Have you means?’
‘I do not, but I could get some from my father, or elsewhere.’
I meant, maybe my aunt Sonia!
But Mr. W offered me an account for my own use. I shook my head. I couldn’t do that.
‘It’s nothing, take them; forget vain arguments, you’ll repay it someday. Property, simple and compound interest, this is what I do myself these days. Do come to England...’ he said.
‘The choice is yours: Oxford, Cambridge, London, or Manchester. You will be given every possible consideration and opportunity. One year to prepare and four years of study, this is more than you need. Once you are properly equipped, you will be able to go to America or wherever you like, but you must prepare first, you must outfit yourself. Now, do it! Promise me. I have been preoccupied with you for a while now. I have taken an interest in you. Now, a stone has fallen off my heart.’
I promised I would give the issue some thought. I was flattered to be sure, but I did not consider myself worthy. And I still wanted to be a poet and revolutionary.
The next day, as I was walking him to the station, he asked me in parting, to come see him again.
All this took place on the night of the thirtieth of December 1907.
As it turned out, we never met again but sometimes I wonder what would have happened had I gone to read natural sciences at Oxford? I returned home with many new thoughts in my head, with new courage and a determination to speak out for all I believed in. It was a time of many arguments between the religious and the secular in our communities. I spoke passionately at a conference protesting the Jewish religious ban on farmers working the land during the seventh shmita year. I hoped the people would take to the streets, in support of the Jewish farming colonies against the religious authorities. On 5 August, 1910, it was reported in the Herut newspaper: ‘Avshalom Feinberg of Hadera cries out: ‘I would not call for war on the rabbis like the previous speakers, but rouse the entire nation.. They would split Israel into their faction against the faction of youths who wish wholeheartedly to work at reviving the nation. Instead, this assembly ought to decide to call for a greater gathering, of fifty thousand, in Jerusalem...’
Yes, I was a precocious youth! Such gatherings and protests would divide the State of Israel for the next century or more. You know of this only too well in your own times. Always the same story, religious against secular, left against right and a protest against autocratic rulers...
I was, truth to tell, not at all religious, even refusing to put on tefillin at my Bar Mitzvah but I knew my scripture thanks to my dear grandfather, who taught me when I was young, and I knew how to argue to full advantage with my knowledge of the Torah and Talmud. Nothing was more precious to me than being a Jew.
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For a short time I was persuaded to go to Egypt - my parents were perplexed by my melancholy and my on and off health problems. They thought, in their wisdom, that a job and an income might sort me out. In Alexandria where Jews had lived relatively undisturbed for centuries, I worked as a clerk, filing and keeping reports for a Palestine Jew known by my father. It was useless and very boring and my nerve inflammation led me back to the sanatorium in Switzerland. A new regime of drugs, cold baths and hot compresses lessened my symptoms somewhat and I then returned to Paris, with the idea of enrolling at the National School of Agriculture, but these plans came to nothing - expense being one of the problems - even Aunt Sonya’s purse was not deep enough and mother was again worried about my health and what I was eating - anxious too that I was no longer observing kosher food laws and, no doubt, worried that I might abandon my Judaism for a ham croissant or a pretty Gentile!
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| Absa outside the Feinberg House in Hadera |
I returned to my family and settled again in the Feinberg House in Hadera, where there was kosher food aplenty and where I remained convinced my future lay in helping create the conditions for a future State. My disdain for the corrupt and devious Ottoman Empire, coloured every waking thought. I wrote to my uncle, Mendel Hankin, regarding the Young Turks revolt and criticising those Turkish Jews - of which, there were many - who sided with Ataturk: ‘In Turkey, a revolution does not unfold that brings liberty and justice to the peoples. It is a revolution led by a ruling nation, which will crush other peoples. Surely you understand that the revolution does not appeal to me, that I find the Turks repulsive, and that this alone, the fact that Palestine is in their hands, seems a sufficient reason. I want a weak, insignificant Turkish nation as it has been until now... We Jews can only work against our masters, with whatever means necessary. And all those who think that we can align with them and rise with them are only deceiving themselves... I am a zealot, and I am not ashamed of it. I declare this loudly. To achieve our goal, I would be willing, if it were in my power, to launch two or three wars against our enemies, as well as every plague and calamity, and set them aflame as one lights a candle...’
But what to do with my political ideas? And where to find a job? The Aronson Agricultural Experiment Station is established in Atlit by my dearest friend, that great maverick, Aron Aronson. An institute registered in New York, the first American research station outside the United States and intended to put his various botanical and agricultural projects into practice. Not long afterwards I begin working there as Aron’s assistant first in Hadera and then at Atlit.
In my 1911 travel journal written while working at the research station in Atlit, I wrote the following: ‘I stood stunned, speechless at the beauty of the plants. All I could think was that I could well understand this way of honouring God.’
Yes, God and I were close friends but my God was nature.
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| Avshalom & Aron at the Atlit Agricultural Station |
A close friendship would develop between us despite Aron being nearly fourteen years my senior and being my boss and a rather dictatorial one at that! At this time I would also meet the rest of the Aronson's family: Alex, Sara and Rebecca or Rifka. Each of whom would play a huge part in the story to follow...
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But now to return to those early years in the Aronson family. The Aronson sisters, like my own ones, emerged from infant swaddling and knitted bootees - much too hot for our impossible climate - to smocked baby dresses, lacy white confections entirely unsuited to the red dust of their childhood games: hoops and skittles, hopscotch and chasing chickens through the dry garden of their home. In a photograph of the time, Rifka and Sara can be glimpsed in front of that dear remembered home with its little porch and small garden, two turn of that last century children - Rifka with that cloud of soft hair underneath a delightful, too large, straw hat trimmed with silk roses, carries a white, furled parasol bordered with a cloud of imported Brussels lace to keep that unruly, burning sun from her pale ‘European’ skin. She was always proud of her appearance. Hated the sun even as a child. Sara, as might be expected, loved the sun! The sun for her was a god, an ancient talismanic power, long worshipped in our part of the universe.
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| Rifka & Sara in Front of their Home, 1904 |
The girls’ dresses were hand-made - every girl at that time, it seemed was a dressmaker or seamstress, before the à la mode dress shops opened in our own little Paris of the Middle East - and before women were permitted other professions. Malka’s elderly treadle sewing machine would be taken from its perch, the village haberdashery shop rifled for ribbons and braid, for the plain, serviceable dresses and pinafores with those large collars that would be the uniform of their school years, along with the black buttoned boots, polished by the little Arab girl who we barely noticed - and soon dusty again with the ancient earth of our beloved land. Rifka in that photograph, aged about 12, stands in front of her new bicycle, a faint smile on her lips. She is bat mitzvah age - the bicycle is a present from the parents - but there is no religious ceremony - in our day such rites of passage were reserved solely for the males in our community. Rifka gets her bicycle bought from a Russian-Jew in Haifa arranged by her accountant brother Zvi who has work there.
Alex takes the picture. He has a thing about cameras and has been in Jaffa where he found a second-hand box brownie, he bought from an Italian traveller who despairing of the heat and dust, was on his way home. That camera records that Sara’s hair is tied back loosely in the almost pre-Raphaelite fashion of the day and that she wears wrist-length gloves, despite the temperature which sizzles nearly bursting the mercury. Yes, despite the heat and the dust and the simplicity of our little town, the sisters are both perfectly and demurely turned out as the feminine sartorial and the male gaze demands.
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| Children from the Village School in the Fields |
They attend the same village school, Alex, Rifka and Sara. Yiddish and Hebrew are spoken at home, English, Arabic, and Turkish, learned in the school. A very basic education - arithmetic, nature studies, writing and reading: the Hebrew language both religious and conversational - the new vernacular, emerging like shoots of fresh green wheat on a spring day.
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| Sara's Books in English, French & Hebrew |
An education augmented by many books - Sara has taken an interest in the martyred, crypto Jews - the Marranos - hunted by the Spanish Inquisition, among her favourites, ‘The Vale of Cedars, or the Martyr: A Story of Spain in the Fifteenth Century’ and ‘The Women of Israel’ both by Grace Aguilar, herself of Sephardic ancestry. In 1902, when multilingual Sara was a 12-year-old in the third grade, she received a French language book ‘Le Brin de Fil’ by Jules Girardin, as a prize for her ‘dedication, cleanliness and model behaviour’.
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| Rifka, Alex & Sara at School |
A photograph taken against a scraggly backdrop of half-hearted struggling eucalypti outside the low building that counted as school, depicts Rifka and Sara in dark school dresses with white zig-zag trimmed collars and neat bows at their necks. Rifka, like a small white mouse, timid and unworldly, was babied by them all. A Raggedy Ann rag doll, her soft auburn curls cascade to her shoulders. Alex in neat, dark school suit and stiff, removable collar with a black tie, a small star on his lapel, stares straight ahead. He is class prefect in the provincial little school - the sole source of their formal education. His face, both superior and proud indicates how seriously he takes his senior position and the status that he feels is his due.
Sara who is fascinated by history - reads more books on Bar Kochba and Masada and the deaths of those escaping persecution and torture. She is serious too, composed, unaware of any beauty she might have possessed. Her head slightly tipped to the right, unruly, pale brown curls escaping from a hastily plaited bun, a fixed gaze, inquiring, intelligent, searching, but giving nothing away. Her early years were those of any family of that first Aliyah - The Return to our ancient, ancestral homeland and an education befitting that beloved land. More pictures survive. The father, Fischel, as he was known by those close to him, white-bearded, though he was not always thus, having once had a handsome head of dark hair, besuited, despite the dust and heat of his new home.
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| Malka & Efraim Aronson | |
Of Malka, only a few pictures that I can think of, not much to go on. The first, with dear old Efraim - Fischel. A close couple, not much given to small talk, or any talk for that matter. Chatter was seen as idle, a waste of valuable time when one could be digging the ground, herding the sheep or stirring the soup. Malka’s hair, already greying, eyes narrowed in some sort of disapproval, mouth scowling at some perceived misdemeanour on the photographer’s part. She always seemed ‘old’ and grumpy to us, and is enveloped in black, a cowl-hood framing that determined visage, a necklace of white, Russian river pearls around her neck - the last reminder of her wedding dowry and her vanished youth. It was said that as a girl, she had seen her father being murdered by a crazed peasant with an axe, in a pogrom in Romania and this might explain her scowl.
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| The Aronson Family c 1910 |
There are a few family portraits in what passed then for their garden, a circle of scraggly indigenous trees. The girls are still teenagers. Sam, the businessman of the family, would soon absent himself from such groupings and will vanish to America in search of a livelihood for his family and only reappear at Sara’s wedding to the man from Istanbul. The father insisted that that forceful mother who was already dead would have wanted it.
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| The Aronson Family c 1911 |
Zvi, who is second from eldest son, is absent from the photograph, being apprenticed to a tradesman in the grain trade in Haifa where he does the accounts with much integrity and thoroughness, though never having the training that would make him an actual accountant. The mother Malka - any good looks she might have possessed, long gone. A thick-set babushka, standing stiffly in yards of black gaberdine, her strong, square, stubborn face, accusing eyes and downcast mouth, set in a show of resigned, much-put-upon unhappiness, encased in a modest black headscarf. Women of her age did not show their hair - or their emotions. At least not to the camera or the public gaze. A cancer is already growing, but she says nothing of it. Fishel, taller, thinner, at her side, always at her side. Rifka, the darling baby sister, seated apparently casually, in a bent-wood chair, delicate, fragile, narcissistic, manipulative, passive or violently emotional depending on her mood and audience, with her pale reddish curls drifting across those fine cheekbones and that pale, pale skin, her light-coloured blue eyes always pleading for love and jealous for attention. Her breasts still girlish, her expression that of a shy adolescent girl caught with some guilty secret. Perhaps the fault with her nature goes back to the loss of those baby sisters Vitya and Loba, whose tiny shadows followed her every footstep. It was said that the Mother had gone into a severe depression after these infant deaths. Her face frozen evermore in sorrow and suspicion. At the back, handsome Alexander, with his carefully pomaded, wavy, dark blond hair and virile, features. Stocky and determined Aron, their example in all things, on the right, arms planted firmly on his knees, eyes gazing straight ahead, already planning his and all of our futures. Sara seated front right, a tabula rasa waiting for inscription, still in total ignorance of her path or her future, the sensible, older sister, calm and unruffled until the bitter, bloody end...
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| Sara, Rifka & Aron Collecting Plants |
In the distance a line of young people walk in single file through the fields in a rush of hypnotic green. Aron, a confident robust young man in his late twenties, and his sisters, Sara, aged fourteen, tall and with that serious demeanor and long swinging plaits, holding a sketch book, and twelve year-old Rebekka/Rifka, shy and small, in pinafore and that too large straw hat, carrying a notebook and a kitten on a lead. Bringing up the rear, Christian Arab driver, Abu Farrid. In his wake, a young Arab servant girl, with a pretty heart-shaped face, and hair concealed by a scarf - Ayla - carries a basket. Every now and then, Aron stops and breaks off a small branch, then a flower or leaf. Abu Farrid says each name in Arabic, Aron repeats the name in Arabic and then in Hebrew. Rifka writes the object’s name down in her notebook, labelling each plant in perfect copperplate handwriting while Sara sketches each specimen in a sketchbook. Ayla sets out a delightful picnic and the young people tuck in with the hearty appetites that come from fresh air and exercise. Sara tells Ayla to join them - but the girl declines.
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It is about this time that our ancient tongue is re emerging into the harsh, glaring light of the Levant. A sun rising to accommodate all the new words necessary in our new life. Technical and trade jargon, conversation and colloquial expressions and new words to describe the wonders of our ancient, new country. Certainly, Hebrew has been with us for millennia, our most fervent and eternally reiterated prayers for a homeland, our rites and ritual, repeated ad infinitum in synagogues and prayer houses, in cheders and yeshivot, all over the Jewish world. The sacred glue that keeps our disparate diaspora communities together. But now lexicographer and new immigrant Eliezer Ben Yehuda leads the battle for its resurrection with the publication of his modern Hebrew dictionary. And Sara and her little sister have a part to play in this national regrowth too.
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| Rifka Labelling Plants |
After their field trips, Sara and Rifka write to the lexicographer that they too are attempting ‘to make our language a living language, a spoken language. None of the children in our settlement know the names of the flowers and plants, the birds that fly, and the insects that hum around our ears, so that we can recognise them when we go for a walk, like the other children of other nations know theirs...’
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| Finding & Naming Flowers |
Sara continues: ‘Our big brother never goes out on any of the many journeys which he makes all over our beautiful land, even the trips he makes around our farm, without coming back laden with plants and stones, and everything he comes across. He guards them as though they were pearls, writes down on a nice card the place where he found every single thing, and calls them by names which sometimes have a strange ring in our ears... Slowly this disease has affected us as well. We also have begun to bring home different things from our walks. He helped us at first, and began to write names on the cards for us too. But now the thing has developed until we are the ones who write everything down, and he has given us the work of sorting and arranging the plants and stones in his collection...’
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| Jewish Pioneers with Arabs in the Background from Noah Sokolovsky's Film of 1913 |
Naming and possessing, some might call it. Another silent documentary, one made in 1913, confirms this intention. Ukrainian Jew Noah Sokolovsky has been tasked with making a film, ‘The Life of the Jews of Palestine’, for the 11th Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland.
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Jewish Pioneers in Zikhron Ya'akov from Noah Sokolovsky's Film of 1913 |
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Jewish Pioneers on the Land from Noah Sokolovsky's Film of 1913 |
It depicts Jewish pioneers and their families reclaiming the land and is greeted with rapturous applause by audiences in Russia, Ukraine, Europe and the Yishuv. Redemption is in the air! The film is lost for many decades and only resurfaces in 1997. It is shown at many festivals and only then are questions asked. Where are the Arabs..?’
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